Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
Rated R
Score: 2 out of 5
Friday the 13th Part 2, rushed into production a year after the original became a box-office smash, lets you know what you're in for the moment it starts. After an extended prologue where the last surviving character from the original is killed off, the opening titles literally explode. This is basically a rehash of the original, a bigger, badder, and meaner film, but not necessarily a better one. The series still hasn't found its groove yet, and in fact, just two movies in, I can say that I now understand why not only film critics, but also horror fans of the '70s, were so hard on this series. It is, to put it bluntly, the Paranormal Activity or Saw of the '80s slasher genre. At its best, it provided brutally violent thrills and chills, but at its worst, it was the kind of plotless-carnage "dead teenager movie" that causes many people to look askance at the genre and wonder just why people find these things so scary. This here is closer to the latter, taking two steps back for every step forward and being saved by some creative kills and development for both the villain and the heroine.
Once more, the plot is barely worth recounting. Five years after the events of the original, a group of young people head up to the Packanack Lodge, a cabin in the woods along Crystal Lake next to the infamous summer camp, to take part in a camp counselor training program. And then the murders begin, as it turns out that Jason Voorhees, the son of the first film's killer, the grieving and vengeful mother Pamela Voorhees, wasn't quite dead. You see, they never found his body, and he wound up running off into the woods and living as a hermit. The point is, it's an excuse for Jason to run around killing people, using machetes, knives, spears, and hammers to bag his quarry for mama.
The closest thing we get to character development is when we learn that Ginny, the final girl played by Amy Steel, is majoring in child psychology and is dating Paul, the head of the program. Beyond that, we get Jeff and Sandra (two lovebirds), Scott and Terry (the former is crudely hitting on/sexually harassing the latter), Mark (a guy who was put in a wheelchair by a motorcycle accident), and Vickie (Mark's love interest). Save for the first two, they all exist as cannon fodder of questionable acting ability, much like many of the characters in the original film. But they're not the stars of the show here, Jason is. He may not get his iconic hockey mask until the third film, but here, he's wearing a burlap sack over his head with a single eyehole cut into it, a look that calls to mind the famous shot of Billy's eye in Black Christmas while giving him a Deliverance-esque "hillbilly horror" feel. Unfortunately, while he may look scary, this first iteration of Jason Voorhees was mostly bark and little bite. He's at his best when he's in the shadows and pouncing on careless prey, scoring two of the best kills in the film like this, the wheelchair death and the bed impalement. However, when he comes out of the shadows to take on the remaining survivors, he stumbles all over the place and is frequently knocked to the ground by Ginny and the others. A good kill is ruined when the chair he's standing on as he waits to drive a pitchfork into Ginny's head breaks under his weight, sending him to the floor. I was reminded of none other than Ghostface from Scream, except that, while the point of Ghostface was that it was just some punk kid underneath that scary costume, Jason is supposed to be a survivalist who's lived alone in the woods for over twenty-five years, and should know how to take down prey. He may have had the look here, but Jason still had a way to go here before he joined Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger as one of horror's most notorious slashers.
The pacing was where this film took the greatest step back. The original had its filler, to be sure, but the pacing here is such that, despite it being eight minutes shorter (87 minutes versus 95), it still felt longer. Most of the kills are stacked into the back half of the film, the opening prologue does nothing to move the story forward except to reintroduce and then kill off a character from the original, and while the body count is the same and fewer kills occur off-camera, the bloodshed here actually felt like it was less than before. The T&A is amped up, to be sure, with the actress playing Terry getting naked in a skinny-dipping scene and all of the female characters seen in bikinis or underwear at various points, but overall, this film felt like it was playing it safe. (That, or, much like My Bloody Valentine, this was a victim of the MPAA's squeamishness about violence after John Lennon was shot; apparently, nearly a minute of footage had to be cut.) The original may have been a quickly-made ripoff designed to cash in on the success of Halloween, but this film felt as though Paramount knew they had a potential cash cow on their hands, and tailored the film to be as appealing to teenagers as possible. Only at the climax does it do anything really interesting, as it actually delves into Jason's backstory and has Ginny exploit that to great effect, in the process bringing back Betsy Palmer, one of the best parts of the original. Just like the original, however, the sudden focus on character felt like too little, too late after over an hour of filler.
The closest thing we get to character development is when we learn that Ginny, the final girl played by Amy Steel, is majoring in child psychology and is dating Paul, the head of the program. Beyond that, we get Jeff and Sandra (two lovebirds), Scott and Terry (the former is crudely hitting on/sexually harassing the latter), Mark (a guy who was put in a wheelchair by a motorcycle accident), and Vickie (Mark's love interest). Save for the first two, they all exist as cannon fodder of questionable acting ability, much like many of the characters in the original film. But they're not the stars of the show here, Jason is. He may not get his iconic hockey mask until the third film, but here, he's wearing a burlap sack over his head with a single eyehole cut into it, a look that calls to mind the famous shot of Billy's eye in Black Christmas while giving him a Deliverance-esque "hillbilly horror" feel. Unfortunately, while he may look scary, this first iteration of Jason Voorhees was mostly bark and little bite. He's at his best when he's in the shadows and pouncing on careless prey, scoring two of the best kills in the film like this, the wheelchair death and the bed impalement. However, when he comes out of the shadows to take on the remaining survivors, he stumbles all over the place and is frequently knocked to the ground by Ginny and the others. A good kill is ruined when the chair he's standing on as he waits to drive a pitchfork into Ginny's head breaks under his weight, sending him to the floor. I was reminded of none other than Ghostface from Scream, except that, while the point of Ghostface was that it was just some punk kid underneath that scary costume, Jason is supposed to be a survivalist who's lived alone in the woods for over twenty-five years, and should know how to take down prey. He may have had the look here, but Jason still had a way to go here before he joined Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger as one of horror's most notorious slashers.
The pacing was where this film took the greatest step back. The original had its filler, to be sure, but the pacing here is such that, despite it being eight minutes shorter (87 minutes versus 95), it still felt longer. Most of the kills are stacked into the back half of the film, the opening prologue does nothing to move the story forward except to reintroduce and then kill off a character from the original, and while the body count is the same and fewer kills occur off-camera, the bloodshed here actually felt like it was less than before. The T&A is amped up, to be sure, with the actress playing Terry getting naked in a skinny-dipping scene and all of the female characters seen in bikinis or underwear at various points, but overall, this film felt like it was playing it safe. (That, or, much like My Bloody Valentine, this was a victim of the MPAA's squeamishness about violence after John Lennon was shot; apparently, nearly a minute of footage had to be cut.) The original may have been a quickly-made ripoff designed to cash in on the success of Halloween, but this film felt as though Paramount knew they had a potential cash cow on their hands, and tailored the film to be as appealing to teenagers as possible. Only at the climax does it do anything really interesting, as it actually delves into Jason's backstory and has Ginny exploit that to great effect, in the process bringing back Betsy Palmer, one of the best parts of the original. Just like the original, however, the sudden focus on character felt like too little, too late after over an hour of filler.
The Bottom Line
So, uh... when does this series get good? Because right now, after two movies, I'm starting to wonder if Siskel & Ebert weren't right about these films. I'm especially puzzled as to how it became a phenomenon so quickly if, after two entries, we still don't have a legitimately great film.
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